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Friday, December 27, 2013

Conservatives hated the Obama administration bailout of GM
and Chrysler, and in the end it did cost the treasury about $10 billion. But in business terms, this was not a cost,
it was an investment. As events continue
to unfold, it is clear that the government had a terrific investment in saving
GM and Chrysler, not just in social and economic terms, but in a financial
sense as well.

Years from now, once the financial accounting is done and
once news can be reported objectively it will be shown that not only did the U. S.
government get its money back from its investment in the auto industry, it made
a huge profit as well. This profit will
have come from not only increased tax revenues from a successful and profitable
industry and its employees, but from the savings in economic assistance that
would have had to have been made had GM and Chrysler, as Mitt Romney put it,
gone bankrupt.

Conservatives despise this outcome, for several reasons.

The
success of the auto bailout is something done by the Obama administration. Anything done by President Obama is to
be hated, no matter how successful.

The
benefits here were largely for working families, not the wealthy. Conservatives believe that any
government assistance should go only to the wealthy in the form of
business subsidies and tax breaks.
Benefits that accrue to working men and women are just plain
socialism or communism.

So the news that GM will
invest $1.3 billion in new production facilities just horrifies
conservatives. Look at where the money
is going.

G.M.
said it would invest $600 million in the Flint
facility, including building a new paint shop that would make its trucks more
competitive in the expanding pickup segment.

The
company is also spending $493 million at another Michigan factory to produce a new
transmission that increases fuel economy and to expand capacity for a high-tech
V-6 engine. The rest of the new spending will be at plants in Michigan,
Ohio and Indiana.

The beneficiary here, in addition to GM and the communities
will be UAW members. How terrible, just
an awful thing to happen to conservatives in the holiday season.